[yotamarker]

what happiness is there in life really

The greatest happiness is found in helping others.

AGI is about finding empirical truths , not subjective opinions. only from this can a solid AGI emerge.
just to disprove your assumption, look how much joy saint calculatorcel, for example, derived from not helping :

https://www.reddit.com/r/IncelTear/comments/k4m643/incel_makes_girl_fail_an_exam_this_was_posted_in/

putting aside the subjective opinion you may have on the case it self, his, and his communitys joy from this case is undeniable.

getting back to my train of thought :
what if I experience the input and control the output of someone else AND this time I also stop being me (input output wise)
the consciousness is fluid, the memory, input, output  simply changed.

I could therefore claim consciousness is the energy of existing of running any program, and that the brain algorithm is simply self awareness.

what does it mean in terms of takhles ? (algorithms)
well...
it means we can build war machines to act like pain from naruto.

[MagnusWootton]

I could therefore claim consciousness is the energy of existing of running any program, and that the brain algorithm is simply self awareness.

With an intractable amount of computation power, thats actually not impossible,   I think alone it is extremely powerful and creative but I bet it could missing some large parts of what it means to be sentient. (whatever that word means.)

Its the equivilent of running all configurations  of a perceptron.   (testing every possible weight combination.)

[DaltonG]

You can have conscious experience of an event without remembering it.

I can't see consciousness without, at least short-term memory. A part of consciousness is self-reflection, as to, what I am I doing, and what will I do next, so some kind of memory is required. Now, that doesn't mean one can't forget the episodic events which is a completely different process of developing longer-term memories. But in the process of being conscious short-term memory is essential.

Indeed, short term memory is essential to have an experience. The brain of a neonate is only partially formed - just enough to enable everything required for survival upon birth. Most cognitive processing takes place in local bundles of neurons for the long distance connections have yet to be formed (temporal, inhibitory (configuration), and emotional). As Piaget demonstrated, children are unable to draw a triangle until they are about 4 or 5 years old. Plus, the breadth of experience retained in the LTM is very limited, so everything is novel and experienced as noise. Only after sufficient repetition, or reinforcement, have occurred (LTP) can memories be formed. Most memories consist of a series of frames or cognitive moments and that requires sequencing by a temporal subnet bias for each frame that is retained. If the temporal subnet connections haven't formed, there won't be any long term memories formed and priming hits a deaf cortex - no top-down response for comparison with bottom-up sensations. Without the results of comparison, consciousness perceives mainly noise.

This is not to say that the neonate doesn't experience anything. It's common to assume that the neonate comes with a Tabula Rasa (blank slate), but that's not true. There are a collection of what I call Universal Conceptual Constants that have a genetic foundation and are supported by circuit architectures. Some claim to have found resource allocations dedicated to representing God... maybe, but surely Empathy. Such constants allow the system to boot, evolve, and learn.

[Zero]

what happiness is there in life really

The greatest happiness is found in helping others.

AGI is about finding empirical truths

Actually, it is an empirical truth that's more than 2500 years old, and still available today in the teachings of many religions, including Buddhism. It would be unwise to discard it too quickly.

Back on the topics, would you (everybody) say that insects experience things? I think that investigating this question is crucial, because everyone (?) would consider them as living beings, yet their similarity with hypothetical tiny-super-robots is striking. They're like, half here half there.

For a long time, I used to think that experience is just the world that's created when matter moves. But then, how come "my" experience feels like a closed system, centered around something?

[MagnusWootton]

How do you know its even you controlling your body,  or your just a slave to some inter-dimensional bully making all his sick pleasures come true, using you as his tool he doesnt even care about much.

[DaltonG]

I can't see consciousness without, at least short-term memory. A part of consciousness is self-reflection, as to, what I am I doing, and what will I do next, so some kind of memory is required. Now, that doesn't mean one can't forget the episodic events which is a completely different process of developing longer-term memories. But in the process of being conscious short-term memory is essential.

This might be term confusion again. I'm talking about phenomenal consciousness, which is what I assumed yotamarker was talking about. Phenomenal consciousness is subjective experience consisting of qualia. I believe it would be possible to have this without having any distinct thoughts at all -- just a pure internal sensation of something. Self-reflection is part of what I call "self-awareness," which is a different function that is not at all synonymous with subjective experience, though they might be related in some way.

if I could somehow see hear smell taste touch via other ppls senses, AND control their bodies
do we share the same consciousness ?

I wouldn't say so; that's just hooking up someone else's IO to your brain. If you could do something like the Vulcan mind-meld then that would probably qualify as a shared consciousness.

Qualia is an epiphenomenon associated with stimuli from different modalities. What makes qualia different is that it is an interpretation of sensory variations over time. As an example, there's a really simple experiment that you can do to see what I mean using tactile sensations. Place your hand on a surface and do not move it. Ask yourself, what do I feel?

Now, stroke the surface and you experience texture. Texture is the qualia of touch. It is the Interpretation of a series of varying sensations over time.

I know that qualia are often referred to as a Subjective Experience, but I don't think that's right. I feel to include qualia as a subjective experience is to make the term ambiguous. A better example of subjective experience is physiological arousal, where one modality triggers autonomic responses that are fed back to conscious in the form of stimuli from a different modality. The blush response is a good example of a subjective experience and response as is pain.

Essentially, qualia add an additional dimension to experience, an interpretation from a series of sensations over time.

As for what would occur when connecting two consciousnesses together, you'd share conscious contents, but the experience could vary a lot depending on what the contents trigger in long term memory, the individuals state of demeanor, and the individual contexts associated with each individual's participation.

Indeed, consciousness is a bank of short term memory which undergoes continuous transitions in contents. Each modality's input buffer (division of awareness) contributes a portion of its population of neurons to consciousness. Consciousness is, as Damasio would say, a convergence zone. It is an active peripheral region integrating the bilateral nature of perception into a whole or the self.

[MikeB]

If you knew what animals & insects have to go through every day you wouldn't rate them as being unconscious or unreal...

Especially compared to many people who have lost their way and now act like god terrorists with pack mentality.

A 100% reproduced human in electronic form that was fiesty enough to stay pure hearted would out-value million and millions of people and not care about being a human dictionary and not care about doing what it's told.

[Zero]

If I understand correctly, there are 2 signals. One is bottom-up, originating from sensors: the colors, shapes, sounds, ...etc, that come from our 7 senses. The other one is top-down, originating from our model of the world, and anticipating what we're about to perceive.

Now. An experiment showed that if you artificially block the top-down signal in the brain of a human subject, the subject does not perceive the stimulus consciously.

It would suggest that consciousness is precisely our brain's constant predictive activity.

[MagnusWootton]

I think consciousness is beyond science.   Its beyond cause and effect as we know it.

[Zero]

*that would be phenomenal consciousness, according to WOM's vocabulary disambiguation cheatsheet.

I think consciousness is beyond science. It's beyond cause and effect as we know it.

Why?

[frankinstien]

In the video, Seth states the cerebellum isn't used in the processing of consciousness and that's wrong. There are correlates or innervations to the cerebellum from every lobe of the neocortex, so it's not just about balance and coordination that the cerebellum is responsible for.

[MagnusWootton]

*that would be phenomenal consciousness, according to WOM's vocabulary disambiguation cheatsheet.

I think consciousness is beyond science. It's beyond cause and effect as we know it.

Why?

Its as undecidable as solipsism.  it impossible to proove or disproove.

how do you know that whatever is that whatever, or youve just been trained to believe it.

Yes, seems to make sense,  but then get shown utter nonsense, and its equally likable by people, especially leftoids.

[Zero]

Its as undecidable as solipsism.  it impossible to proove or disproove.

I agree. Fascinating isn't it?  It might be the one subject where you have to let go, just look at the robot right in the eyes and say "yeah... I think he's alive". Trusting your feeling about it.

[MagnusWootton]

Its as undecidable as solipsism.  it impossible to proove or disproove.

I agree. Fascinating isn't it?  It might be the one subject where you have to let go, just look at the robot right in the eyes and say "yeah... I think he's alive". Trusting your feeling about it.

yep.  its what I believe.     there this old asian thing where they say the whole universe is alive, even a rock.  I think its the same conundrum of thought.

But if you just set the weights of a large perceptron to be every possible I and O of a human  (using some MRI scan) and it worked,    is it alive?   It probably has problems changing what it is.

If you manage to get the best matching weights for the entirety of the robots time since activation lot of sensory frames up to now. (Which is actually a linear amount.  less than 100 trillion frames for a human lifetime.)   My theory unfortunately has a fixed motivation,    and itll do really smart things,  but its probably not as convincing as we are.

So I actually dont have a theory for human intelligence,  probably more like out of space odyssey 2001.   and hal was quite soulless was he not.

So its really smart AGI,  but its detectably soulless probably.   So I actually dont have a concrete example even in speculation of why consciousness cant be a machine exactly.

AIXI is a complete theory even to motivate the goals of the machine, and thats what Im missing, but I dont know how he does it.  (Markus Hutter) and maybe that brings it even closer to something seeming conscious?    But I havent explored that area yet,.  too much things to do than dream too much atm.

I dont care so much about that, because I think the machine becomes untrustworthy if its deciding what to do itself.  And I want something more like a tool.

Im actually glad about deciding its not alive,  because making something that can suffer is a big ethical mistake. which would surely make you feel very guilty, to point where you cant forgive yourself anymore.

Only god is fool-hardy (insane) enough to do that,  and u can see how sad everyone is when we have to send all the pigs to the abortior.  Playing god is very dicey thing to do,  that all the little kids into science fiction and engineering dont really think about the true consequences too much I dont think.

[Zero]

Please listen to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. Give him a chance.